Andy until 1960 or so, and I believe I was the only one who ever did get
really close to him. Both being long-timers, we were in the same cellblock
from beginning to end, although I was halfway down the corridor from him.
'What do I think?' He laughed-but there was no humour in the sound. 'I
think there was a lot of bad luck floating around that night. More than could
ever get together in the same short span of time again. I think it must have
been some stranger, just passing through. Maybe someone who had a flat
tire on that road after I went home. Maybe a burglar. Maybe a psychopath.
He killed them, that's all. And I'm here.'
As simple as that. And he was condemned to spend the rest of his life in
Shawshank-or the part of it that mattered. Five years later he began to have
parole hearings, and he was turned down just as regular as clockwork in
spite of being a model prisoner. Getting a pass out of Shawshank when
you've got murder stamped on your admittance-slip is slow work, as slow
as a river eroding a rock. Seven men sit on the board, two more than at most
state prisons, and every one of those seven has an ass as hard as the water
drawn up from a mineral-spring well You can't buy those guys, you can't
no, you can't cry for them. As far as the board concerned, money don't talk,
and nobody walks. For other reasons in Andy's case as well but that
belongs a little further along in my story. There was a trustee, name of
Kendricks, who was into me for some pretty heavy money back in the
fifties, and it was four years before he got it all paid off. Most of the interest
he paid me was information-in my line of work, you're dead if you can't
find ways of keeping your ear to the ground. This Kendricks, for instance,
had access to records I was never going to see running a stamper down in
the goddam plate-shop. Kendricks told me that the parole board vote was 7-
0 against Andy Dufresne through 1957, 6-1 in '58, 7-0 again in '59, and 5-2
in '60. After that I don't know, but I do know that sixteen years later he was
still in Cell 14 of Cellblock
5. By tben, 1976, he was fifty-eight. They probably would have gotten
big-hearted and let him out around 1983. They give you fife, and that's what
they take-all of it that counts, anyway. Maybe they set you loose someday,
but well, Listen: I knew this guy, Sherwood Bolton, his name was, and he
had this pigeon in his cell. From 1945 until 1953, when they let him out, he
had that pigeon. He wasn't any Birdman of Alcatraz; he just had this pigeon.
Jake, he called him. He set Jake free a day before he, Sherwood, that is, was
to walk, and Jake flew away just as pretty as you could want. But about a